Magic Statistics

A series of political gaffes and blunders has taken a toll on Ségolène Royal's quest to be elected president of France.  The latest poll shows her opponent Nicolas Sarkozy widening his lead.  It gets worse.

In almost every question in the poll, Ms Royal trailed her main rival, the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy from the ruling conservative UMP party. Mr Sarkozy's campaign was more "solid" (57 per cent against 25 per cent for Ms Royal); he was more "precise" (52 per cent to 23 per cent); and he was more credible (45 per cent to 31 per cent).
. . .
After months of running neck and neck, Mr Sarkozy is now pulling ahead, despite accusations that he is employing smear tactics.

Ms Royal has just returned from a weekend trip to the French Antilles, where she blamed her problems on dirty tricks by her centre-right opponent and his political allies.  Well, what else would she say?

But she has repeatedly fallen victim to her own embarrassing errors, which more and more French voters are seeing as evidence of inexperience.  She has bungled statements on a wide range of issues, including Quebec independence, France’s nuclear missile capability, Chinese human rights, and support for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Thus, it is not surprising that nasty rumours are beginning to circulate about her future as the Socialist Party’s candidate.

Some senior Socialist politicians are said to have discussed a "lifeboat scenario": an emergency switch of candidates in early March if Mme Royal's poll ratings collapse.

Sego appeared to do well on her trip to the West Indies (no obvious gaffes, anyway), where she was campaigning for votes on Martinique and Guadeloupe.  The two islands are officially part of the republic of France, although, as Charles Bremner of The Times of London suggests, it’s hard to tell exactly what distinguishes them from colonies.

From the moment you arrive in Fort de France, the capital, it is obvious that being part of  the  republic has huge benefits. Unemployment is high and the economy is poor but rather than the ramshackle air of the rest of the Caribbean, the French islands feel relatively prosperous. This is thanks to huge subsidies from la Métropole [France]– and from the European Union, of which they are of course part. The roads, communications, gendarmerie, schools, the health and other public services are French. The French 35-hour working week also applies.
. . .
Treating the islands as part of France is convenient but it is really a fiction that gets around a colonial reality.

But one great French tradition has been adopted well on the islands: going on strike. For the past few years Martinique and Guadeloupe have been struggling to win back tourists — especially Americans — who deserted the resorts because of work stoppages that disrupted their vacations. This week, the Club Med in Martinique blew up all the good work.

The Boucaniers resort, on a gorgeous site on the south coast, was reopened in 2005 after a 60 million dollar renovation. It has now been forced to close at the peak of the season, sending 500 holiday-makers home because there are no free hotel rooms on the island. There was almost a riot at the airport as passengers from France who had paid 3,000 euros per couple for the week and flown nine hours across the Atlantic, were told that they were going to be put back onto flights for home. Travel agents from New York to Sydney are again telling customers to avoid the French Antillies. 

Ségo got out of there just in time.

Previous related posts:

• Ségolène blunders again
• Vive le Canada libre!
• French politicians courting the “scum” vote

A hotel in Greater Manchester, England, was recently awarded the bottom prize in the annual TripAdvisor.com Traveller’s Choice hotel awards for Britain.  A very enterprising reporter named Nigel Bunyan apparently viewed that as a challenge, for he promptly checked in to see if it’s really as bad as all that.

His verdict?  His room “was not the complete nightmare one might have imagined”.  Now, there’s a ringing endorsement.

A hotel in Greater Manchester has been accused of being the dirtiest in Britain in a survey of tourists from around the world.

The Britannia Hotel in Stockport was called "absolutely disgusting" and "a dump" by some visitors while others claimed to have found a plughole full of hair and cobwebs on the ceiling in their rooms.

All but three of the 43 people who reviewed the hotel for website tripadvisor.com gave it the lowest possible rating.

Maybe I'm mellowing, or maybe I'm just not as picky as I once was, but having seen the Britannia Hotel Stockport, I had expected far worse of Room 308. 

Mr Bunyan says he’s stayed in worse hotels.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t name them.

I know TripAdvisor.com well, for I made extensive use of the site in planning our two-month visit to Great Britain in summer 2004.  Generally speaking, I found it informative and very helpful, so I recommend the site for travellers.

The TripAdvisor pages (here and here) with reviews of the award-winning Britannia Hotel Stockport are riotously funny.  Only three of 45 reviewers (two more have chimed in since Mr Bunyan wrote his article) give this dive dump hole establishment a rating above the absolute minimum of one and, based on the comments, the visitor who rated it a five really meant to give it a one.  Here are a few sample headlines:

• “Holiday from hell”
• “Disgusting”
• “Don’t stay even if you are desperate”
• “Seriously – Don’t do it”
• "Total Dump, Dirty, Unfriendly staff, worst hotel ever – Stay away !!"
• “Just appalling”
• “For the love of God stay away”
• “The Fleapit”
• “Don’t go there!”
• "Awful!!!!" [gotta love those exclamation points]
• "A Rancid Dump"
• "Whatever you do – Stay somewhere else!"
• "Don't stay here even if they pay you"

Well, you get the idea.

The hotel’s website is here.  (Caution: Several TripAdvisor reviewers warn not to be fooled by the attractive pictures.)  Room prices range from £39 for a single to £49 for a family room.  For UK hotels, that’s dirt cheap (sorry).  Our cheapest B&B cost more.

US troop strength isn’t the only thing surging in Iraq right now, so’s the economy.  Growth is booming in most economic sectors, including construction and real estate development, retail and wholesale trade, and oil production.  The average employed Iraqi is earning double what he or she earned under Saddam, and that’s after adjusting for inflation.

Globe and Mail business columnist Neil Reynolds reports on an almost invisible story.

Three years ago, Iraq had 8,000 registered companies. Last year it had 34,000. Two years ago, Iraqis owned 1.4 million cellphones. Last year, they owned 7.1 million. (Iraqna, the country's leading mobile phone company, reported revenue of $333-million [U.S.] in 2005, $520-million in 2006.) Baghdad now has five times as many cars as it had before the war.

Global Insight, the economic research company, puts Iraq's GDP growth for 2005 at 17 per cent and for 2006 at 13 per cent.

Guesstimates of joblessness in Iraq have varied widely, most suggesting that unemployment is rampant—between 30% and 70%.  In mid-2005, however, a survey by the Rand Corporation applied internationally accepted concepts, definitions, and methods to produce a reliable estimate of 10.1%.

The Rand report to Congress described Iraqis as hard-working and self-motivated entrepreneurs.

"The problem in Iraq isn't unemployment," the report said. "It's poverty."

One big reason for Iraq’s economic resurgence is the 15% flat-rate personal and corporate income tax implemented by former US administrator Paul Bremer in 2004.  The government has also made much progress in dismantling Saddam’s labyrinth of economic preferences and restrictions in order to decentralise economic decision-making.

It’s bad enough that Liberal leader and aspiring Prime Minister Stephane Dion insulted oil-sands workers while on a bad-will good-will tour of Alberta.

“All these workers living too fast for the easy money in the north,” the prime minister-wannabe blasted as Liberal-appointed senators Tommy Banks and Grant Mitchell looked on.

That provoked a scathing response from Edmonton Sun columnist Neil Waugh.

I don’t know what your idea of “easy money” is. But it sure isn’t living in camp and freezing your butt at 40 below building oilsands plants. But Tommy and Grant sure know what a soft touch looks like.

Darcey at Dust my Broom, who's done some hard time in the oil patch, has two words for Mr Dion: “F*** off”.

As I said, that’s bad enough—but what’s even worse, in my view, is Stephane’s ignorant dismissal of the economic value of those jobs.

“All these workers living too fast for the easy money in the north,” . . . “It’s not good for the economy.”

He apparently knows nothing at all about economics.  Of course, more high-paying jobs are great for the economy.  The employment created by the oil sands is probably the biggest single reason why Alberta has, according to Statistics Canada, the fastest-growing economy ever seen in Canadian history.  The world-class business newspaper Financial Times called the oil sands North America’s “biggest resource boom since 1898”.

Alberta’s unprecedented boom may be causing problems for other areas of Canada, however.  Workers are moving to Alberta from eastern Canada, draining productive workers while boosting wages for many of those who stay behind.  Quebec’s economy was struggling well before Alberta’s latest boom (but that’s Quebec’s own fault).  Ontario seems to be slipping into recession.

So, one could argue that Alberta’s sustained strong growth is bad news for the economies of eastern provinces.  Maybe that’s what Stephane Dion really meant.  But it’s probably not a politically astute idea to say that in Alberta.  Save it for Ontario and Quebec.

h/t: Darcey at Dust My Broom

Previous related posts:

• Alberta’s economy strongest ever in Canadian history
• BC and Alberta to form united economic powerhouse

In the 1972 federal election, New Democratic Party leader David Lewis famously made “corporate welfare bums” a campaign slogan. He was referring to the scandalously large grants, loans, loan guarantees, and subsidies Canadian governments were handing out to large and profitable corporations.  Mr Lewis may have passed away in 1981 but, as On the Dole, a new report from Canadian Taxpayers Federation, documents, the corporate welfare bums are still alive and prospering, thanks to the continued connivance of government.

Over the past 23 years, the federal Department of Industry doled out over $18 billion to businesses.  Of this, $7.1 billion was in the form of repayable loans; yet, only 17.6% ($1.25 billion) has actually been repaid.

Technology Partnerships Canada (TPC), which is Ottawa's flagship corporate welfare program, has authorized $3-billion since its inception in 1996 and recovered only $169-million. This is a repayment record of less than 6%. Taxpayers were originally told every TPC investment dollar would return $1.74 in repayments from businesses;

The Top 50 subsidy recipients have received a third of all money authorized or $5.9-billion;

The Top 3 recipients have secured $2.6-billion in federal handouts. They are Pratt & Whitney ($1.5-billion authorized plus another $350-milion announced in Dec. 2006 that is not included in this report), Bombardier ($745-million authorized plus another $350-million announced in Nov. 2006), and General Motors Canada ($360-million) . . .

Perhaps because of these generous business hand-outs, among industrialised countries, Canada ranks near the highest in average combined federal-provincial corporate income tax rates.  As well, Canada has a marginal tax rate on capital that is second only to China’s.

Canada could have much more competitive corporate tax rates if the excessively generous program of business subsidies and grants were scaled back.  Not only would Canada’s international competitiveness improve, we would have a simpler, fairer, and more transparent business tax regime.

The full 30-page report can be downloaded here (pdf).  An 809-page appendix listing every business subsidy given out by Industry Canada during the period under investigation, with date and amount, can be downloaded here (pdf).

Note that the report examines only Industry Canada assistance; hand-outs through federal regional development agencies are not included. The data were compiled through freedom of information requests to Industry Canada.

Previous related post: Why give tax breaks to the oil sands?

In less than 25 years, over 20% of the US population will be aged 65 or over, imposing a tremendous burden on younger workers who are expected to pay for the retirees' medical care and Social Security benefits.  The system is unsustainable without huge increases in taxes and/or significant reduction in benefits, but no American politician is willing to deal with the issue.  That, in turn, is because boomers, unwilling to face reality, will exact electoral revenge if their high-priced entitlements are threatened.  Boomer Robert Samuelson tells it like it is.

Shame on us. We are trying to rob our children and grandchildren, putting the country's future at risk in the process. On one of the great issues of our time, the social and economic costs of our retirement, we have adopted a policy of selfish silence.

As Congress reconvenes, pledges of "fiscal responsibility" abound. Let me boldly predict: On retirement spending, this Congress will do nothing, just as previous Congresses have done nothing. Nancy Pelosi promises to "build a better future for all of America's children." If she were serious, she would back cuts in Social Security and Medicare. President Bush calls "entitlement spending" the central budget problem. If he were serious, he, too, would propose cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

They are not serious, because few Americans — particularly prospective baby-boom retirees — want them to be. There is a consensus against candor, because there is no constituency for candor.

Any talk about "fiscal responsibility" is empty rhetoric as long as everyone continues to ignore the elephant in the room.

When Washington instituted Social Security benefits for Americans aged 65 and over, life expectancy was only about 60.  Less than half the people were expected to live long enough to collect.  Today, however, life expectancy is over 77.  It should therefore surprise no one that the system cannot afford to fund retirement at present levels for everyone who makes it to 65.

What’s really surprising is that today’s boomers, who can expect to live almost to 80, think the system can remain essentially the same as it's been for over sixty years.  Not merely selfish, but blindly so.

Canada faces an even more extreme aging problem than does the United States, but the Canada Pension Plan pays less generous benefits than does the American Social Security system.  Nevertheless, Canada will soon have to deal with a similar disparity between revenue and expenditure in its old-age security program with the same stark alternatives: higher taxation or reduced benefits or both.

Previous related post: Boomers elevated individualism above common good

In a remarkable ruling, Yukon Supreme Court Justice Ron Veale last week said the federal government has the right to take legal action against company directors in order to recover the costs of cleaning up a closed Yukon mine site.  Ottawa is now preparing to sue directors of B.Y.G. Natural Resources in Ontario, where the company is registered.

B.Y.G. Natural Resources operated the Mount Nansen gold and silver mine, located about 180 kilometres north of Whitehorse, between 1996 and 1999.

It was forced to close because it did not comply with the conditions of its water licence.

It was found guilty of three counts of failing to comply with the licence by a Yukon court judge who said the company seemed intent on "raping and pillaging" the territory.

The federal government has already spent about $12 million to keep the abandoned mine from polluting the surrounding environment. The mine's cleanup is expected to cost about $23 million.

The mine was abandoned in 1999 when the company went into receivership, at which time the federal government assumed responsibility for managing the mine's remaining assets and cleaning up the site.

The judge who fined B.Y.G. $300,000 in 1999 for water-licence violations said the "inept, bumbling, amateurish and possibly negligent” company "demonstrate[d] an attitude consistent with 'raping and pillaging' the resources of the Yukon".

The fine was never paid, but company officers took the feds to court in an attempt to regain ownership of the most valuable asset they left behind: $1.3 million in shares in a nearby property.  Last week's ruling denied that application and empowered federal authorities to sue directors for the environmental mess the company created in Yukon.

The full decision is posted here (pdf).

Fewer British tourists have been visiting Paris lately, so the official Paris tourist office has launched a new campaign to entice more Brits to visit the City of Lights.  The concept behind the new tourism promotion?  It’s easy to be just as arrogant and bad-mannered as the French.  Here’s how.

Parisians do not usually mock themselves to please the British, but a cut in the number of cross-Channel visitors has inspired a tongue-in-cheek campaign to show les anglais how to be as rude as the French without learning the language.

In an attempt to recast the city’s image, the regional tourist board has issued a guide to, mostly offensive, Parisian gestures.
. . .
The British, accounting for one in five tourists, are the most frequent visitors to the capital region but the total fell by almost 1 per cent last year. A survey showed that two thirds of British visitors find conversing with Parisians difficult. “They say that Parisians are arrogant, pretentious and strange,” the board said.

The new Paris tourism website reassures Brits that the French aren’t so hard to understand.  “You don’t need to speak French to understand Parisians or to blend into the crowd.”  The Attitude Game page illustrates and describes eight classic French gestures.  The key to Camembert (below), I think, is the deadpan expression, signifying utter indifference.

Award-winning cartoonist Matt Pritchett offers his take in today’s Daily Telegraph (right).

Times of London correspondent Charles Bremner can think of a few gestures the Paris tourist people left off their website.  Apparently, there are limits to how far the French will go in their quest for more pounds sterling.

Apart from the bras d'honneur, the standard Latin F—off with hand on arm and fist in the air, I was thinking of the squiffy, or drunk, gesture, turning the hand anti-clockwise before the nose, as if holding a bottle (In the Russian version, you tap under your chin). And there is the contemptuous gesture of drivers in traffic — hitting the steering wheel with both hands and letting them rebound into the air. Sometimes you see a whole line of jammed drivers performing it in unison.

The concept of enticing tourists by ridiculing yourself was actually started by the English.  The Channel train company Eurostar recently ran Londres à deux, a campaign to increase visits from France to London, with a photo showing a naked British couple streaking across a soccer football field in front of a capacity crowd.  Then there’s the current Eurostar promotion Londres en amoureux with a cringe-making illustration you can see here.

Previous related posts:

• New destination for adventure travelers: Chechnya
• Yukon gets lots of tourists
• New Jersey wants tourists

Late last month, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed to name the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.  Nunavut Environment Minister Patterk Netser has now gone on record against the proposal.

Faced with another examination of its wildlife practices, the government of Nunavut is preparing to defend its polar bear policies where it believes they need to be defended — the court of southern public opinion.

"That's where the problem is," Patterk Netser, Nunavut's Environment Minister, said yesterday from Coral Harbour. "The problem is down there. Not here."

Nunavut is being caught between environmentalists using the powerful predators as a lever to move the U.S. government on the issue of climate change and politicians seeking an opportunity to look good, Mr. Netser says.

See also this statement by Dr Mitch Taylor, Polar Bear Biologist with the Nunavut government, pointing out that there is no evidence that Canada’s polar bears are endangered.  (More from Dr Taylor here.)

An Iqaluit newspaper charges that the proposal to list the polar bear as endangered arises, not from scientific consideration of the bear and its habitat, but from a political fight to force the Bush administration to acknowledge global warming.

The announcement is a response to a petition launched in February of 2004 by an environmental organization called the Centre for Biological Diversity. In December of 2005, two other groups, the Natural Resources Defence Council and Greenpeace U.S.A., joined the effort and helped launch a lawsuit against the U.S government.

Those groups say shrinking sea ice threatens polar bear populations. Their goal is to force the Bush administration to acknowledge the reality of climate change and adopt policies aimed at reducing the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Those groups are now declaring victory, because they believe they’ve forced the Bush administration to stop denying the science that reveals the true extent of global warming.

“It’s an affirmation that global warming is real,” Brendan Cummmings, a lawyer for the Centre for Biological Diversity, told the Guardian newspaper last week.

Swell.  Environmentalists score political points against hated Washington Republicans, and the livelihood of Inuit hunters in northern Canada is mere collateral damage.

US Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) recalls that, only a few years ago, the US Geological Survey reported that Alaska polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs”.  Sen Inhofe argues that the proposal to list the polar bear as endangered shows that the Endangered Species Act is “broken”.

h/t for Inhofe statement: Greenie Watch

Previous related posts:

• Polar bears are “vulnerable”. No, wait, I take that back.
• Bizarre bear shot on Banks Island

UPDATE (5 Jan.): Follow-up: Polar bears threatened by computer models

Another sign of the end?  What on earth could have prompted a deputy secretary general of the Zionist-entity-vilifying United Nations to say this?

Gregoire de Kalbermatten, deputy secretary general of the antidesertification group at the United Nations, said, “We need to learn from the resilience of Israel in developing dry lands.”

It must be a miracle.  And, frankly, it does sound like a miracle: Advances made by Israeli scientists have enabled development of fish farms in the Negev Desert.

Scientists here say they realized they were on to something when they found that brackish water drilled from underground desert aquifers hundreds of feet deep could be used to raise warm-water fish. The geothermal water, less than one-tenth as saline as sea water, free of pollutants and a toasty 98 degrees on average, proved an ideal match.

“It was not simple to convince people that growing fish in the desert makes sense,” said Samuel Appelbaum, a professor and fish biologist at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at the Sede Boqer campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

“It is important to stop with the reputation that arid land is nonfertile, useless land.”

That’s not all: water from the fish farms is recycled to irrigate olive groves and date palms.

The next step in this country, where water is scarce and expensive, was to show farmers that they could later use the water in which the fish are raised to irrigate their crops in a system called double usage. The organic waste produced by the cultured fish makes the water especially useful, because it acts as fertilizer for the crops.

Fields watered by brackish water dot Israel’s Negev and Arava Deserts in the south of the country, where they spread out like green blankets against a landscape of sand dunes and rocky outcrops. At Kibbutz Mashabbe Sade in the Negev, the recycled water from the fish ponds is used to irrigate acres of olive and jojoba groves. Elsewhere it is also used for irrigating date palms and alfalfa.

Could this system be used in the Saudi and other Middle Eastern deserts?  One would think that a possibility worth investigating.  Before that can happen, however, Israel’s Muslim neighbours would have to forego suicide bombing and other murderous acts in order to demonstrate their trustworthiness as potential business partners.

So, Arabs, which is it?  Continue a self-destructive campaign aimed at eliminating Israel, or embrace the opportunity of a decent life for you and your children by asking Israel to make your desert bloom like theirs?  I hope you’ll think on that.

h/t: American Thinker and Brad Drell, who also point out that the desert fish farms are quite embarrassing to mainline Protestant denominations that promote boycott and disinvestment campaigns against Israel.

Previous related post: Israel to begin producing energy from oil shale

The “bomb” part appears to be unintentional.

Iran Khodro, Iran’s state-owned car manufacturer, has been making Peugeots under licence since 1990, but a slight problem has cropped up recently.

Hundreds of Iranian-made cars have suddenly caught fire on Iran's roads over the past months, with police pointing to the Peugeot 405 as the main culprit, the press reported yesterday.

Since March, there have been 125 incidents of cars catching fire without warning and then killing or injuring the occupants, traffic police chief Mohammad Rooyanian said.

"Around 300 people have been killed or wounded and 40 per cent of the fatalities were attributed to the Peugeot 405," he said. "We are not to going compromise on this issue. We are emphasizing the need to improve the safety of the vehicles, so that our citizens will not be worried any more."

That’s crazy!  125 cars caught on fire and 300 people killed or injured.  Can you imagine the uproar—and the raft of class-action suits—if that were to happen in North America or Europe?  Millions of motor vehicles would be recalled.  Company sales would be in the toilet.  Politicians would be agitating to have corporate executives thrown in the slammer.

But, in Iran, the traffic police chief shrugs it off.  He doesn’t even say we’re working on it; he only says we’re talking about it.  (But we won’t compromise on our talk.)  So, stop worrying.

Is Iran Khodro still in business?  Is anyone still buying their cars?  Why would any sane person drive a vehicle made by criminally negligent incompetents?

Gotta love the Globe and Mail’s headline: “Deadly self-igniting Iranian-made cars causing concern”.   It’s good that someone’s concerned about that.

This kinda makes me wonder how worried we should be about those inept bozos making nuclear bombs.

Previous related post: Iran’s public works department has its hands full

It's been a busy year for the state-owned Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom, which Vladimir Putin has developed into a tool for pressuring small neighbouring countries to turn against the West and forge closer relations with Moscow.

At the beginning of 2006, Gazprom put Ukraine through the wringer by radically hiking the price of gas exports to the pro-Western former Soviet republic.  The gas supply was shut off on 1 January after Ukraine refused to pay, then restored three days later after an agreement was reached.

Now at the end of the year, it's déjà vu all over again—but with a twist. Gazprom has rounded on perhaps Russia’s closest ally: Belarus, a country that already supports Russia's foreign policy.  Gazprom has reiterated its decision that, as of tomorrow, the price charged to Belarus for Russian natural gas will more than double.

"All this means destruction of our relations" with Russia, Belarus's president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, said in comments carried on state television on Friday.

Mr. Lukashenko, often referred to as Europe's last dictator, called Gazprom's position "blackmail" and said Belarussians would rather live in unheated dugouts than pay the higher price.

Russia's deputy prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, who is also chairman of Gazprom, retorted that Belarus was "blackmailing" Europe by threatening the transit pipelines that cross that country.

The latest price increases have added to concerns about the reliability of the oil and natural gas flowing from Russia, which is a major supplier to Europe but has increasingly wielded its energy resources for political leverage.

Why would Russia strong-arm a close ally?  Some analysts believe that Russia's motivation this time is not political imperialism, but simple greed.  It just wants the money.  Welcome to the world of the real Russian mafia.

Gazprom has given Belarus the option of paying for gas with small unmarked bills shares in Beltransgaz, Belarus's state gas company.  In a few short years, Gazprom could be majority owner of Beltransgaz.

Gazprom has also infuriated residents of St Petersburg.  It is planning to erect a 300-metre glass office tower that would profane the city’s historic skyline so badly that some Russian bloggers have started a campaign against the company.

The graphic at right shows a monster named Gazilla threatening St Petersburg’s Smolny Cathedral.  If you click on the graphic, you will be taken to a flash game created by the St Petersburg branch of the Yabloko [Russian Democratic] Party.  The page is entirely in Russian, but the game isn’t hard to figure out: When Gazilla appears, point and fire ASAP.

h/t: Global Voices Online

Previous related posts:

• Russia on the ascendant against divided West
• Belarus: Europe’s most oppressively anti-religious nation
• Russia no longer a politically free, democratic country
• Europe beholden to Russian energy supplies

UPDATE (31 Dec.): Belarus avoided freezing in the dark with only seconds to spare.  Two minutes before midnight, a deal was signed for a price marginally below what Gazprom had originally demanded. The deal also calls for Gazprom to purchase 50% of Beltransgaz over the next four years.